Thank you for all the people who take care of the earthquake in China!

I am a student in Dalian, a city in the north of China,I never feel the quake here untill now.

But I see the whole society ,include the students, companies and goverment are trying their best to help the people in Sichuan province.

I just want to talk about the facts besides me after the earthquake.

Now I have donate all my money in the phone account as well as my classmates, although it is less than 100 yuan.

The whole university is statistic the student list whose family is in Sichuan Area.

There is a widely disscussed passage between in students.

以下信息是由chinaz李典新从现场记者目击地震后中现场发回的聊天记录，目击现场目击温总理实况：

The follwing information is the chat, supplied by the reporter of chinaz ,Lidianxin, who have witnessed the scene after the earthquake .

绮梦(3603*****) 10:07:29 现场简直不能看了

qimeng(3603*****) 10:07:29 I can not stand the disaster scene.

绮梦(3603*****) 10:08:33 年过花甲的总理已经哭得不成样子了

qimeng(3603*****) 10:08:33 The president is crying.

绮梦(3603*****) 10:10:16 刚刚挖开的地方又塌方了

qimeng(3603*****) 10:10:16 The area just opened landslided again.

绮梦(3603*****) 10:11:24 这倒霉天气还在下雨，现在一线的军人已经被下达死命令，必须冒雨解救

qimeng(3603*****)10:11:24 It is raining now, the frontline soldiers have been issued an order to save the people in the rain.

绮梦(3603*****) 10:11:56 我现在是在都江堰市

qimeng(3603*****)10:11:56 I am in the DujiangYan City

绮梦(3603*****) 10:13:24 交通已经瘫痪了，人员和物资很难运进去

qimeng(3603*****)10:13:24 Traffic has been paralyzed, and difficult to transport goods into.

绮梦(3603*****) 10:13:47 汶川现在还不让我们去

qimeng(3603*****)10:13:47 Now we can not go to Wenchuan area.

绮梦(3603*****) 10:15:21 汶川的交通完全封闭了，现场到底怎么样我不知道，不过早上总理指示军队不管有多大代 价，必须进城

qimeng(3603*****) the closure the traffic of Wenchuan has completely closure, I do not know how kind the scene there, but the Prime Minister instructed the soliders no matter how difficult,must be get into Whenchuan city.

I was thinking the same thing myself, why all of a sudden would people start posting here like this? Could it be perhaps a systematic propaganda attempt, to cultivate good will directly into sites like this? I wonder if other sites similar to FR is also experiencing posts like this out of the blue.

Throughout history — as here in America — MOST citizens of a nation people are most often decent, hard-working folk who simply wish to live their lives surrounded by their families and friends.

Also throughout history, it is not most citizens who are the problem between nations. It is the power-hungry megalomaniacs and elites running them — either by force or so-called “popular election” who are the problem.

This citizen of THIS nation is saddened that so many citizens of YOUR nation have been victims of a devastating earthquake — especially the children — and earnestly hopes you are able to recover from this disaster and move on to rebuild your lives and correct the clearly major problems with your government — as we will the less serious problems with ours.

Contrast the Chinese response to this crisis with the Burmese Junta's response to the cyclone.

I read “Red Star Over China”, by Edgar Snow. (I had dinner at his home once, another story.) Snow was an American journalist who met with Mao in the 1930’s prior to America's entry into the War. One anecdote that stuck in my mind was his description of a man whose clothing was on fire in a major Chinese city. As people walked by in seeming indifference, he grabbed a passerby’s coat to extinguish flames. The passerby demanded compensation for his coat. This callousness shocked Snow's American sensibilities.

It was his hope that Mao and Communism would reform what he perceived as the extreme selfishness in the Chinese character. Today, China appears, to an outsider, to have high levels of economic freedom and almost no political freedom, sort of like Singapore. [BTW, my company does some business in China (civilian air traffic control) and the stories of corruption and venality that I hear would make your hair stand on end.]

There a quite a few Chinese immigrants and Chinese-Americans at my company and a number of them I consider to be friends.

I extend my prayers and well wishes for the victims and hope that China's future fulfills her promise and that our two countries can live in peace and mutual respect.

9
posted on 05/14/2008 5:33:14 AM PDT
by Lonesome in Massachussets
(The women got the vote and the Nation got Harding. Worse followed. Worst to come.)

For a fleeting moment I thought that perhaps the censors and their equipment have been knocked off-line and perhaps the chinese people have free and unlimited access to information.

But no, China’s a big country and considering that, the quake really did little in damaging the infrastructure. Perhaps it is a campaign beginning now and continuing throught the Olympics, you know, to make China appear less represive and more “humane.”

FreeRepublic is available in China. I had no problem in Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shanghai while visiting. I wish Freepers would at least take one trip to China to get a better understanding of what is going on there. The government cannot put the cork back in the bottle now that the genie has been released.

The Chinese I encountered were honest, gracious and very hospitable hosts.

I am very sad at what has happened there and my prayers go out to them.

Yeah, FR has been available in China since the beginning. Freepers need to really see what's happening in China.

National Geographic's monthly rag has dedicated this month to only China coverage. If anyone is worried about the future of education in the US, read about how Chinese students are going to leapfrog all others.

The genie is definitely out!

21
posted on 05/14/2008 7:52:11 AM PDT
by InShanghai
(I was born on the crest of a wave, and rocked in the cradle of the deep.)

No, FR is not blocked or flitered in China (just ask any of the many Freepers who has posted from China while traveling or are currently living / working here). Don’t think it ever has been blocked or flitered in my experience.

Mainland Chinese has pretty much unfettered access to major western media / political / news forums (one interesting aspect of Chinese censorship - its more focused on monitoring access to Chinese internal sites as well as some overseas Chinese language sites, but not external non-Chinese sites).

Most English literate Chinese people (and thats growing by a lot these days, including pretty much anyone who is college educated, and ever more so since English classes are now mandatory from 5th grade onward) are keenly aware and interested in how the West sees China and how news about China are reported and discussed in the West.

For sure a lot of my collegues in Shanghai are spending their spare time at work surfing the net and checking out international news coverage.

So, to answer your question, they are here to see and hear how the world is reacting. And no, theyre not just on FR (maybe it seems that way to you if you only hang out here), they are on pretty much all the major English language news forums (check out the comments on news stories relating to Chinese quake on all the alphabet network news internet sites, BBC, NYTimes ... blah, blah, etc, heck, they are all over YouTube too).

Did the earthquake disable the Internet blockers? I doubt FREE REPUBLIC is allowed in China, afterall.

English language websites don't get a lot of attention*. Something like 99.99% of Chinese can't function in the English language, although some do get lessons from Chinese teachers of English who can't function in English either. Given that English is taught mainly in Chinese - one textbook I saw had something like 80% Chinese characters, and 20% broken English sentences - it's not exactly surprising. Have you had high school Spanish? How many times have you looked up Spanish websites, let alone try to read the articles within? The Chinese get much lower-quality English language instruction.

* National Review, Weekly Standard and Free Republic are all available there. What you can't access are Chinese language websites based in Hong Kong, Taiwan and other places where the content can't be censored by the Chinese authorities. At the same time, note that much of this censorship doesn't matter. The average Chinese is more likely to believe the government than he is to believe other sources. This is kind of the reverse of the way many Americans feel about Uncle Sam's pronouncements. Once you've gone through the Chinese educational system, which stresses Chinese superiority, achievements and territorial conquests (presented as efforts to civilize the natives) to the exclusion of everything outside China, while simultaneously presenting overwrought and one-sided accounts of Chinese defeats by foreign countries, you're inclined to distrust the Western barbarians, however you might react to them on a personal level.

thanks for you 4ll about china
and Red Star Over China was written in 1940s
china has made some progress during the past 70 years
we can not stay at yesterday
each country has the problems of corruption and venality,
do you remember the Enron Corporation?
in deed, chinese people has less freedom in politism, but not “no”, we can not stop our steps for we have problems.
i am in shenzhen, china

I also offer my prayers that you soon shake off the yoke of your tyranical masters and reclaim a china that has liberty...TRUE liberty.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that ALL men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

We do not hate your people....many are now part of our own soul...but we are very suspicious of your Govt and it’s actions.

They regularly send agents here to propagandize so I can't agree with that. I and a few others have fought with them for years. So far I have counted 24 Chinese sign ups since last night. They don't appear to be of the same cloth as the usual agents.

No, he isn’t the first. A number of us, led by indcons, have been battling PLA trolls who’ve been trying to post ChiCom propaganda here for several months now, particularly on the Tibet and Olympics threads.

36
posted on 05/15/2008 3:02:50 AM PDT
by Virginia Ridgerunner
("We must not forget that there is a war on and our troops are in the thick of it!"--Duncan Hunter)

Keep up your good work! I was quite happy to see the free world realizing the Chinese oppression of Tibet, and now the Chi-Coms are trying to distract from this. No Communist Olympics for me. And I will never spend a cent for or in an unfree country (the only exception may be to pay for a regime change).

Let freedom ring from the snow-covered mountains in Tibet to the green meadows at the Southern Chinese Sea!

Let freedom ring from the Taiwanese coastline to the Great Wall!

Let freedom ring!

39
posted on 05/15/2008 3:12:54 AM PDT
by Michael81Dus
(I believe in the One-China-Policy: One China. One Taiwan. One Tibet.)

Crim...may be i will disappoint you...
yes, i also still remember what happened in 1989,in Tiananmen square,
but each country has its darkness in the history, do you remember the Water Gate in US?
and, i love my poeple,we are on the road to the bright future,China isn’t fall behind all aspects
the people are eager to live in a peaceful life, the people have many ways to modify the faults of our gov. but not shake off, for the process of overthrow only bring more deads than earthquake...
i also hate CCP and some of the bad behaviors of gov.
but time changes everything...
the gov. has much differences with 20 years ago...
if it(the CCP) is still stay at the old steps,you may be not see me here in FR...

That’s not entirely true. China-based FReepers had trouble accessing the Net after their PsyOps expert/FReeper troll “pganini” was exposed as a ChiCom agent and was banned a while ago. AS somebody who is in constant touch with freedom lovers in China, I know this for a fact and other FReepers can attest to it.

Additionally, we have a US-based FReeper whose blog has been banned by the ChiComs and continues to be banned.

While I see no reason to doubt your experiences, these are subjective and are not representative of all FReepers who post in China/on the bloodthirsty ChiCom regime.

Tiannanmen Square is not the same as Watergate (the latter wasn’t even worthy of a single newspaper article, btw) and your comparison is laughable. It demonstrates the typical ignorance exhibited by those who have lost the ability to think on their own (AKA ChiCom bots).

We’ll discuss these points later. At this time, I, like other FReepers, will be praying for the rescue and treatment of all the victims of the recent earthquake.

“Darkness” in ChiCom history (Tiannanmen Sq. was minor compared to rest of the genocides that were directed by syphilitic Mao and his minions):

1. Deliberate starvation and extermination of entire pro-Nationalist towns and cities (after WW2 and prior to the communist coup)

2. Invasion, occupation, and genocide of millions of Tibetians (that continues to this day)

3. Forced resettlement of Tibetians and Uighirs (continues to this day)

4. Great Leap Forward

5. Cultural Revolution

These atrocities don’t include the 1-child only policy, the execution (AKA forced organ donation) racket, and the Chinese support for maniacs in Zimbabwe, Sudan, Burma, and N. Korea.

I really hope the Chinese people will overthrow their murderous regime and create a system that they really deserve.

As Napoleon predicted, the Chinese giant has woken up (thanks to aggressive prodding by the “free traders”). Whether the Chinese people decide to join civilized nations or not depends on your ability to get rid of the tyrants that stifle freedom and liberty and work in amity with your neighbors and trade partners.

I agree 100% with Tigers Eye and Virginia Ridgerunner. The ChiComs have been infesting FR for a few years now. They know what they are upto and clearly follow the PLAN (Peoples Liberation Army and Navy; also includes their espionage services) line when it comes to sowing disinformation.

The peoples’ media (as represented by fora and blogs) is the way of the future and the ChiComs, astute and cunning observers that they are, know this fact.

Some of us have been tracking ChiCom propaganda on sites like FR (obviously), DU (lots of fellow travelers and agreement there), YouTube (!), and Yahoo Answers, among others.

Please accept my heartfelt condolences for the tragedies being suffered by the people in China and its colonies. Prayers for the deceased and the living - esp. childrens’ suffering, which is always heartbreaking.

I agree with you on the need to hold your governments accountable. Good luck. You need it.

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